Abstract: From its beginnings in the 1980s, the field of the history of sexuality has been extremely anxious about identity categories, particularly for queer histories. In the 2010s and 2020s, this anxiety shaped a wave of studies of transgender people in the past that did not find any transgender people in the past, or so their authors claimed. This essay examines this trend in the field, tracing its history and arguing that we need a new approach. It does so in part through a critique of Foucault’s History of Sexuality vol. 1.
Laurie Marhoefer (Wed,) studied this question.